Es stinkt wie Fondue!

After last week's big Friday night on the town, we mostly laid low the following chilly drizzly Saturday. Fully napped and bored by evening and without much food at home (we mostly avoid supermarkets on Saturdays because they're suffocatingly overcrowded as virtually all stores including supermarkets are closed Sunday), we took advantage of a rain delay to venture to a new Kloten restaurant. We're Sunday evening regulars now in the glass-enclosed non-smoking area at local favorite "village" Restaurant Löwen serving classic Swiss food--where the waitstaff's 20 words of English comfortably complement our 20 of German--but this was Saturday evening and we felt like changing the pace.

We resolved to test our luck with some British cask-conditioned ale and fish & chips at an establishment called The Londoner Pub attached to an old local hotel called The Bramen that Stephanie had spied riding the bus to her office. As we exited the bus that evening and walked past the dimly lit hotel towards the pub, the nighttime weather cooperated with its rendition of London: cloudy, damp and windy.

We pushed open the heavy door to find The Londoner...completely empty. Not a soul in sight, not even anyone smoking. Passing through the small pub, we studied the bar taps for Fuller's, Whitbread or Kilkenny, instead finding only Falken Pils, emblazoned with a falcon and decidedly NOT British. Also no fish or chips immediately visible.

Moving from The (Non-)Londoner to a larger area beyond, we discovered the entire front of the hotel harbored its own restaurant, fairly busy with an older crowd. The decor felt guildhall-esque, with deep green felt walls framed in dark wood and a sense of worn history and age. Not inspirational but not uncool in an old-Swiss-village-hotel kind of way. Hazarding a guess that the menu featured (anyone?) classic Swiss food, we approached the greeter's stand to try things out.

Utilizing our German skills to their utmost, we said "Grüezi!" to the greeter and then, "Zwei, bitte," indicating the (obvious) number of seats needed. He began mumbling rapid Swiss-German and although we didn't understand a word, his intentions were clear, gesturing first to the fully occupied front room ("I don't have two seats up here right now..."), thinking for a moment, then gesturing instead to the back room down a hallway ("We should have two seats back there but, um..."). A hesitation. Then the explanation, which I swear we understood clearly although uncertain of the exact words, something very near, "Es stinkt wie Fondue." Meaning in German, "It stinks like fondue."

After a split second spent processing this information, Steph replied, "Ja, sehr gut!" meaning, "Yes, very good!" After all, who doesn't want to stink like fondue? He nodded, grabbed two menus and escorted us down the hallway.

[Linguistic note: according to my sources, High German for "smells" is riecht and "stinks" is stinkt, pronounced schtinkt. I'm sure the nice man didn't tell us his restaurant stinks, my guess is that the unmistakable "sch-" sound that our ears translated was the Swiss-German verb for smells.]

Stretched along the hallway were two buffet tables displaying platefuls of raw sliced pork, veal, beef, shrimp, salmon and several other fish alongside at least twenty labeled dipping sauces of various colors and consistencies. The back room obviously hosted some manner of "fondue festival" and here was the command center.

Sure enough, the large back room contained plenty of seating with only three tables occupied with fondue eaters including two families, although we've noticed that often when families dine out here, they really dine out and tables of a dozen people from mismatched adult siblings to grandma to teenage punks are not uncommon. And to the greeter's credit, the aroma of boiling-oil fondue hung rather thickly.

Steph and I briefly considered joining the fondue festival but ultimately opted for lighter dining with an enormous fried wienerschnitzel and entrecôte (a grilled steak concealed by herbed butter) with mounds of french fries and accompanied by a bottle of Spanish red wine (Spanish seems like the bargain wine in Switzerland, always good and relatively value-priced). Dare we say the food was quite good, actually superior to that of the Löwen! And have I mentioned that restaurants here extract nearly identical prices regardless of location, from suburban Kloten to Zürich's Old Town to the lone mud-caked restaurant in farming village Gerlisberg? We finished by splitting a phenomenal ice cream sundae drowned in Bailey's under fresh whipped cream.

As we exited the restaurant a leisurely two and a half hours later, two of the three tables of fonduers were still going at it, sauntering occasionally to the Command Center and returning to dunk more skewers into sizzling oil. We retraced our path to the now-occupied Londoner pub to polish off a few British Falkens, follow Swiss hockey league highlights on the big TV (they love hockey here, Kloten has its own team and goalie school) and absorb some cigarette smoke.

Needless to say, even after airing out during our walk home around 1am, we indeed GESTUNKEN horribly like oil and veal and fish and cheese and smoke and deposited all clothing items down to the underpants into the washer before satisfyingly retiring for the night.